A Western diet high in fat and sugar can put an individual at inflated risk of developing a severe infection - one in all the foremost common causes of death worldwide - a study has found. The analysis, revealed within the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, takes a better look at how the Western diet affects the severity and outcome of sepsis. Sepsis, the body's reaction to fighting an infection, can lead to shock and organ failure, researchers aforementioned. It's the eleventh commonest reason behind death worldwide.
Researchers from Portland State University (PSU) in the United State fed mice Western diet - characterized as being low in fibre and high in fat and sugar. The mice showed a rise in chronic inflammation, sepsis severity and better mortality rates than mice that were fed a normal diet. The findings recommend the mice had a lot of severe sepsis and were dying faster because of something in their diet, not because of the weight gain or microbiome, the body's community of bacteria, said Brooke Napier, an assistant professor at PSU.
"The mice's immune system on the Western diet looked and functioned ," Napier aforementioned. "It looks like the diet is manipulating immune cell perform in order that you're a lot of liable to sepsis, and then when you get sepsis, you die quicker," she said. The findings will facilitate hospitals better monitor the diets of patients in the intensive care unit since they're already the ones most likely to develop sepsis, researchers said.
"If you know that a diet high in fat and sugar correlates with the increased condition to sepsis and inflated mortality when those patients are in the Intensive Care Unit, you can make sure they're eating the right fats and the right ratio of fats," Napier said. "If you could introduce a dietary intervention while they're in the ICU to decrease their chances of manipulating their immune system in that way, you can somehow influence the outcome," she added.
The team also identified molecular markers in Western diet-fed mice that could be used as predictors or biomarkers for patients that are at high risk for severe infection or patients which will like a lot of aggressive treatment.